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What is happening with Dragon Ball FighterZ is normal for the fighting game scene. Fighting games are a niche market and DLC (even DLC announced months prior to launch) is generally accepted in the FGC to help support the genre. I think what gets most people is the short roster, however, what they don't understand is this isn't Tenkaichi or Xenoverse. Those games contribute their high roster to copy-paste development. AkySys is known for having small to medium rosters where each character is nearly entirely unique. They see the DLC characters and immediately believe they've been shorted on content when in reality having 15-30 completely unique characters isn't any less than having 100+ characters and only 15-30 unique styles between them. It's mostly a difference in whether or not content is "inflated". Dragon Ball FighterZ will be a competitive fighter for competitive players who have been waiting for a DB one. It will have some fun times for causal players but they're not necessarily the target audience. That's why serious fighting game stories tend to be shallow but feature high octane mechanics that require precision and timing. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be upset when they learn button mashing and needless beam spamming won't win matches in this game. Some of them are about to learn what frame timing really is and it's going to be rough.

Most of the complaining I see is from people that were expecting Xenoverse 2D. And I can understand their disappointment, DB games have been rehashes of the same basic engine for a while and their fans have grown accustom to it.

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It's a bit late to weigh in, but I wanted to get as much information as I could about the product before I really cast my opinion into the mix.

On a personal level, FighterZ seems really disappointing so far. And not because of the limited roster, though that adds to it very slightly, or because of the Season Passes early announcement, but because of the actual gameplay. It's been stated quite a few times in here that the game plays like MvC with a Dragon Ball skin, and while most of the people saying so have cited it as a good thing, it just killed any interest I had in it when I actually got to play the demo. Add on the fact that the basic gameplay with each character doesn't really change (I know they have niches, unique ranges, certain times where certain moves are preferred, but in terms of combo execution), and I just don't feel like this has enough to make me buy the full game.

I agree with @Majin Goo that this is going to be a serious fighting game, but even so far as serious fighting games go, this feels really bland, to me. Which is really sad, because it should be rife with personality. This isn't the 2D Dragon Ball fighter for me.

That said, I'll probably get my own level of enjoyment from the game just watching the finals of high-tier tournaments. So many pretty explosions.

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As someone whose main game is Marvel and has been playing Versus games competitively for years, DBZF plays NOTHING like Marvel. As I keep saying, it is more akin to Guilty Gear than anything else. Also every character definitely feels different. Especially since the new additions to the roster.

TETO but I honestly don't agree with that at all on a fundamental level.

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That's fair, and I'm not really trying to change anyone's feels here. If you're hyped, be hyped and I really hope you enjoy. But I really just can't get hyped, or interested, for the above reasons.
Even if we move away from the MvC comparison and more towards Guilty Gear, it still just feels... Meh? idk, I had fun with GGXrd, and I just found myself really heavily bored by the FighterZ demo all the same.

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Yeah, the Closed Beta. Admittedly, we only had a limited number of characters, and it's definitely not signatory of the final product, but it's been about the only chance I've had to interact with the game beyond demos and hype.
This said, I will actually submit that A18 was fun af to play. And Krillin was neat, as was Trunks' sword moves. But even with those few dissimilarities, it really doesn't hold up to the range I found in even the early Guilty Gear games (Ky is bae, ftr), and I just didn't really feel the game.

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I'm super excited about this game but the Xenoverse (Tenkaiichi) kids on the Facebook threads are pissing me off. This is the 2D fighting game I've been waiting well over a decade for and if one more goes off in a 10 page rant about there not being 200 characters and it will be a shit game for it I may have to find where some of these kids live and date their moms out of spite.

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Not really. I'm a classy guy and will treat the moms with absolute respect and no expectations. Just a nice night out away from her obviously bratty kid so she can get the break she absolutely deserves having to deal with such an entitled fart sniffer.

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So the first day of the non preorder open beta (Sunday) was a clusterfuck. Nothing would connect, no matches were working, and those that did usually dropped out. I literally had a lobby with me and one other local friend in it and no connections happened.

Then at 3am somebody must have done something cause everything started working. I played for a couple of hours, slept till about 11, and when I got up within 5 minutes of turning my PS4 on I had a match. It stayed consistent until I stopped playing Sunday night.

Now the graphics are gorgeous and the gameplay is fan-ducking-fastic. This is easily the most accessible , casual friendly fighter I have ever seen (which is a good thing) but there are definitely layers that better players will crack open and bust the game wide open.

For every 5 games I won, maybe I lost 1, the quality of players was abysmal lol. Most people didn't know what they were doing, and just didn't block ANYTHING. But I did get some good matches with good people in.

All in all it was fantastic, and they are adding another day to the beta at a TBA date before the release, which is next week. Hopefully they will be nice and make it this weekend, so that people have a chance to play SFV: Arcade Edition, which dropped today.

What about you TT? Did anyone get to play? What did you love/hate? Sound off below!

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So the first day of the non preorder open beta (Sunday) was a clusterfuck. Nothing would connect, no matches were working, and those that did usually dropped out. I literally had a lobby with me and one other local friend in it and no connections happened.

Then at 3am somebody must have done something cause everything started working. I played for a couple of hours, slept till about 11, and when I got up within 5 minutes of turning my PS4 on I had a match. It stayed consistent until I stopped playing Sunday night.

Now the graphics are gorgeous and the gameplay is fan-ducking-fastic. This is easily the most accessible , casual friendly fighter I have ever seen (which is a good thing) but there are definitely layers that better players will crack open and bust the game wide open.

For every 5 games I won, maybe I lost 1, the quality of players was abysmal lol. Most people didn't know what they were doing, and just didn't block ANYTHING. But I did get some good matches with good people in.

All in all it was fantastic, and they are adding another day to the beta at a TBA date before the release, which is next week. Hopefully they will be nice and make it this weekend, so that people have a chance to play SFV: Arcade Edition, which dropped today.

What about you TT? Did anyone get to play? What did you love/hate? Sound off below!

I had plans to play but family bs screwed that for me. It's okay, I'll catch the next one.

It is good to here a review from someone that actually knows what they're talking about. Most of the hate I've seen on mechanics have come from people that end up revealing that fighting games aren't their thing anyways...

I can't understand the hate for Auto Combos, worst off, people acting like it's the first game with auto combos. In every game I've played that has an auto combo situation they have never been useful at high level competitive play. I could always tell when someone was using stylish mode on BB or didn't know manuals on KI. Once I realized that, the ass whooping was on.

I think I remember reading someone didn't like it because they get ass stomped. Man... It's good to see casuals in the fighting game scene haven't changed. I missed the good old days of being called a cheater for blocking and parring attacks consistently. It's good to know that will be coming back with the accessibility of this game (Hint: I'm not a jerk, banter is part of the fun in Fighting Games).

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I got to play about 4 tutorials, though at the end of each one it kicked me out, so I did what any true hero would do and gave up.

Saaaaaame.

Watching gameplay online, the game seems absolutely awesome now that we've got a larger roster, with a lot of variety. But the demo just refusing to work killed a lot of hype for me, and by the time it was working, I had work. But I'm really happy to hear about other people having good experiences with it.

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No practice mode on the Beta? So I can learn the basic buttons? Out. Bailing ship.

But... the tutorial... plus the Beta is specifically there for testing the servers. It's not there for players to enjoy the game but so the developers can try to take care of as many day one server issues as they can before day one. There is a practice mode in the full game.

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No practice mode on the Beta? So I can learn the basic buttons? Out. Bailing ship.

There is a tutorial that teaches basic game mechanics.

11 hours ago, Majin Goo said:

But... the tutorial... plus the Beta is specifically there for testing the servers. It's not there for players to enjoy the game but so the developers can try to take care of as many day one server issues as they can before day one. There is a practice mode in the full game.

Yes and no. While, yes, one goal for a beta is to test the servers that isn't the only objective. It is to get people excited for the game, move pre orders and, second only to testing server strength, testing characters/general gameplay. There is a reason certain characters were omitted from this beta and that is because they collected enough data from them during the last one. They are watching to see what characters are used (and not used), how they are used, and what (if any) exploits are found, including in the general gameplay. Perfect example, as stated in my article, during the closed beta damage scaling was so damn high it almost wasn't worth using a super at the end of your combo. Now the scaling has been adjusted so using supers is worth it.